It meant nothing. Nothing.

Abruptly the gag was removed and a mouth was on hers, hard, hungry, as Lucas kept up with his soothing and stirring kisses along the insides of her quaking thighs. All her arguments shattered, because it was Matt’s mouth on hers, Matt’s scent filling her nose, Matt’s warm skin so close, that rough, handsome jaw that she ached to touch.

Sheer fulfillment flooded into an emptiness yawning open in her chest like a wound. His lips were the healing touch, reassuring her, yet spinning her off her axis once again so that something within her screamed in fury and desperation.

Giving in to it, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl and she bit, latching down on his bottom lip.

Instead of him jerking away, allowing her to rip and tear at him as he was ripping and tearing at her insides, his hands cupped the back of her head, holding her still. Despite her painful vise on his bottom

lip, he kept his mouth crushed over hers, his tongue plunging along her clenched teeth, his own lips persuasive, gentle. Responding not with matching ferocity, but with devastating tenderness. When his touch slipped forward to caress the sides of her throat, her cheek, she realized she had let go. The acrid taste of his blood lingered on her tongue.

“You’re doing beautifully,” he said in a whisper against her, his breath touching her cheek just below her mask. “They all love you, don’t you know that? You can’t do anything to drive us away. We’re your family.

Your lovers, your friends, the adversaries that challenge and stimulate you. Your real social life, not the theater and charity events, the occasional dinner with a man just for show.”

She shook her head. No. She would not let this outrageous situation become that personal. She wanted an end to it, to go home.

Which meant she had to admit they had broken her, that she was as soft and vulnerable as Matt claimed she was. Capable of being hurt, manipulated. That he affected her so strongly that she couldn’t see this through to the end he had planned.

She went rigid, refused to let her body respond. After a moment, she heard a sigh, felt him draw away.

“Do you know it’s often the women who are strongest in public that most desire a man’s Mastery behind closed doors, Savannah?”

She shook her head, in protest or denial she couldn’t say, but she had no words with her body throbbing with the aftermath of the climax and the sense of loss his withdrawal caused. Lucas had pulled back as well, and now stimulation came in audible form only. Matt’s voice, hearing the shifts of their bodies around her, the rustle of clothing, the sound of their breathing.

“You have this overwhelming desire to surrender, to submit to a man strong enough to Master you. It’s like an aphrodisiac to the man who senses it. I know the exact moment I recognized it in you. It was like a punch in the gut. Or a light bulb going on.”

She heard the smile in his voice, and cold fingers gripped her vitals. Just by speaking the word, he had evoked the memory. A memory she had replayed over and over in her mind, not understanding why it was so fascinating to her. But he had known, and now so did she, despite her strongest desire to deny it.

“I know you remember it.” His voice took her back with him to the uncomfortable recollection. “I know I do. I’ve relived it every day since it happened. It led us to this moment.

Didn’t it?”

* * * * * He’d come back from the dinner break early, ostensibly to make a couple of phone calls, but there was always the possibility that he would see Savannah and could spar with her for a few enjoyable moments.

It made him frown, though, knowing he would find her in her office. She went on business luncheons, attended banquets and gala events with the right escorts, but never did he see her sitting on the edge of one of the downtown fountains, eating a sandwich and taking in the pigeons’ play, engaging in idle people watching. Or, even more shocking, out with a girlfriend, laughing, having some female conversation.

Doing some playful male-bashing.

“She’s not a woman, she’s a fucking robot,” he’d heard one competitor say. “Geoffrey Tennyson didn’t spawn her, he had her built in one of his plants.”

It had made Matt angry, and he’d made sure to scuttle the man’s plans for overseas expansion with him.

Lucas had pointed out it was an emotional, rather than a fiscally intelligent act, and he had not disagreed with that assessment. Nor had it erased his satisfaction in doing it. He wondered often if Savannah realized she had a circle of devoted knights trying to protect her from harm when she wouldn’t even let them into the inner circle of her life.

Geoffrey was gone, and what protection the man had provided, as well as the damage he had done, was gone. She was as alone in the world as a person could get. He wanted her in his world, and she wouldn’t even give him an opening to make a move in that direction.

He rounded the corner, his peripheral vision sharpened so he could see if she was in her office. The door was open, her desk light on. And she was standing on top of her desk.

She hadn’t taken off her shoes, and he assumed it was to give her extra height to reach her objective, though he shuddered to think about her stepping on her unstable wheeled office chair in those skinny heels.

He detoured. Determining in a few strides what she was doing, he quickened his pace.

Apparently a bulb had burned out in the incandescent ceiling lighting she preferred to fluorescent.

Anal-retentive plague that she was, she was changing it herself, rather than waiting to have a maintenance person with solid shoes and a ladder do it tomorrow. She was on the ball of one foot, the other off the ground, straining, her right breast clearly outlined against the fabric of her turquoise turtleneck. The ceiling was too high for her to use one hand to steady her upper body, and as she worked to free the panel over the light fixture, she was precariously balanced. When it came free with a jerk, she overbalanced.

Matt got there in time to clamp his hands on her hips, his palms curled over the hipbones, his fingers on the soft curves.

“What are you doing? Get down from there.”

She was flustered, and he didn’t often get to see that. She backed out of his hold, and he nipped the panel from her fingers, taking it to the floor.

“I’m trying to change a light bulb.”

“I can see that. Get down.”

“I just need to—”

“Get. Down. Now.”

Instead of coming back with another sharp retort, he saw something incredible happen. A moment of confusion. Nervous tension.

Something came over him, too, an instinct, and the remarkable feeling that a door had just swung wide open. And he wanted to test it.

“You heard me, Savannah,” Matt said softly. “Come here. Now.”

It was a long moment. Then she shifted her gaze away from his, down , and moved toward his reaching hands, her neck and cheeks flushed.

Still reeling from the revelation, he almost missed his cue, but he recovered in time to take her elbow as she reached down for him. He gripped her waist and she put her hands after a brief hesitation on his shoulders, curiously docile as he lifted her clear of the chair, pushing it out of his way, and lowered her to the floor.

It was a moment before he found his voice, and he managed to make it gentle, since she was blinking at him with the startled look of a deer, not anything like the Savannah he knew.

“Don’t you attend the corporate safety seminars you torture your employees with?”

He saw the snap as the spell was broken. She even took a defensive step back, looked around herself, and that familiar disdain and faint irritation took over her features.

“We fulfill all OSHA requirements, Kensington.”

“Oh, yeah. That was definitely an OSHA-approved maneuver.” He flicked a hand out, caught a loose lock of her hair, enjoyed her look of shocked anger at the casual familiarity.

“I know you think you have to live up to your Savannah Cyborg image, but you don’t have to be and do everything yourself, you know.”

He actually saw a split second of hurt at the nickname that was used too often for her not to have overheard it countless times before. It made him angry with his clumsiness. And with her, for being so worthy of the name, but only in how she closed herself off to any advances of affection or friendship.

“You delegate administrative tasks to your assistants. Why can’t you let other people help you with things?”

He let his concern for her show, hoping to amend that inadvertent barb. “Damn it, if you’d fallen, there’d have been no one to see you fall.”

“That’s the plan,” she said dryly.

“Better to bust your backside when no one’s looking.” Some of the spunk was returning, but in the shift of her eyes, he saw she knew something significant had happened.

He wondered if she understood what she had revealed, if she even knew it about herself.

The thought brought out a fierce possessiveness in him, a desire to crush anyone who’d taken advantage of such a sweet gift. He enjoyed the many faces and forms of sex, and having an excess of alpha in his personality, he’d often let the natural Dominant in him take over with his casual lovers who liked BDSM.

The idea of exercising it in a less casual mode with the woman who’d become his obsession was so intoxicating he had a hard time keeping his cock settled in his trousers. Fortunately, she chose that moment to distract him.

“Fine.” She tossed her head, presented him with a bulb from her desktop. “You want to do maintenance, here’s your chance.

And don’t worry. I’ll stand right here and catch you if you fall.”

Typical Savannah. In the time he’d had two thoughts, she’d marshaled her defenses and reorganized her strategy. He thought if Napoleon had had her, the world would have undone the Tower of Babel and everyone would speak French now.

The Russian winter couldn’t have defeated nerve that cool. But he’d seen the heat just for a moment in her eyes, in that soft expulsion of breath as he set her down. He’d also felt the warmth of her skin beneath her clothes. Maybe she would have melted the ice in Russia, if she couldn’t match it.